I was prepared for badly translated English before I came here. You only have to look at “All your base” to realise that the translations aren’t perfect. What I wasn’t prepared for was the shear amount of it. English is a popular advertising tool in Japan, and it doesn’t seem to matter what it says, as long as there are English words. There is so much that it stops being funny after a while, because it feels like you’re just sitting there taking the piss out of a people who, let’s be fair, can generally speak a hell of a lot more of my language than I can theirs. This is without mentioning the predisposition of many Westerners to have tattoos of Chinese and Japanese symbols for “Strength”, “Tiger” or whatever. Steve often said he wondered if Orientals do the same thing, by tattooing “Lion” and “Power” in English. Thankfully it seems, they don’t. Some of the translations are corkers though, either for the “So near and yet so far”-ness or just the seemingly random stringing together of words for the hell of it. Here’s just a couple:

“Duo Daily Concept Love Family” – This is a bric-a-brac store in town.
“Crated is love, festered by intelligence” – Brand tag line on the back of a T-shirt.